Trauma for Everyone

Were you mistreated as a child? Or have you just gone through a particularly nasty divorce? Or suffered a steep drop in the stock market that wiped out half your savings? In earlier days you might have been told to “Get over it!” But now a friend, or a therapist, might suggest that you’re a candidate for Posttraumatic Stress Disorder, or PTSD. It has become one of the more popular psychological conditions of our time. First used to describe the symptoms related to combat experiences in war, today a diagnosis of PTSD has been expanded to include some of the most common everyday situations. How it got that way is the subject of Stewart Justman’s fascinating exploration of the rise of PTSD—its initial intent in the wake of the Vietnam War, its insistence on society’s role in producing individual trauma, and its broadening to the point where virtually every American may qualify for this formal disorder. This is a story of a questionable diagnosis and of medicine gone astray.